Scott Tobias

During its network run, “Veronica Mars” was two shows at once: an ultra hip, modern-day Nancy Drew, full of self-contained mysteries cracked by the prodigious daughter of a private eye, and a sun-scorched procedural in the tradition of “Chinatown” and “The Long Goodbye,” revealing the sordid underbelly of a seaside town. With the movie and the new Hulu season, however, Thomas no longer had to worry about appealing to a more general audience. Season 4 jettisons case-of-the-week episodes to tell one complete story about a series of bombings that turns the city of Neptune into a less-than-ideal spring break destination.

The good news is, it’s possible to dive right into the fourth season cold. But the series does make reference to events dating back to the beginning, so it’s better to know the basics. Here’s where all the relevant players stood heading into the new season:

Veronica (Kristen Bell)

Through her last two years of high school and most of her first in college, sleuthing was a sideline in Veronica’s life, an unofficial extension of her father’s business as a private investigator. Nine years later, in the movie, she shelved an offer from a prestigious New York law firm and returned to Neptune to defend Logan, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, from a murder charge. She ultimately opted to stay home and take over the family business, Mars Investigations, fighting the corruption that roils her town. The two defining cases in her life both happened in the first season: The murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane, which was pinned to her boyfriend’s philandering movie star dad, and her own drugging and rape at a party, which takes longer than a season to solve.

Logan (Jason Dohring)

Neptune’s resident troublemaker is James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando rolled into one snarky, tempestuous rich-kid package. He’s bruised, volatile and problematic: never above suspicion yet never guilty and always a presence in Veronica’s life, even when they’re on the outs. They’re an item now, and Logan has settled down over time, having enlisted in the Navy and sculpted an upper body that would make Michael Phelps blush.

Keith (Enrico Colantoni)

A World’s Greatest Dad contender several seasons running, Keith lost his job as Neptune’s police chief after botching the Lilly Kane case, but he stuck around as a private investigator. His daughter’s prodigious talent was a source of pride and concern during her student years, but he has happily served as Veronica’s partner (and subordinate) ever since she left the nest. He is also recovering from a nasty car crash.

Wallace (Percy Daggs III) and Mac (Tina Majorino)

Veronica’s best friend at Neptune High, Wallace has been her partner-in-fighting-crime from the beginning. But he has been pushed ever-so-gradually to the margins over time, as Cindy Mackenzie, known as Mac, a computer hacker and premium wiseacre, has filled the same role. Mac isn’t in the new season, which would seem to give Wallace an opening. But he has settled into a coaching job at the high school and didn’t figure much into the movie.

Weevil (Francis Capra)

Although he is the leader of the PCHers, a biker gang that terrorizes the locals, Weevil has always had a soft spot for Veronica, who is similarly marginalized in a moneyed community. In the movie, Weevil’s heroic attempt to shield a rich driver from bikers resulted in a bullet to the chest and a false accusation of assault. He returned to the criminal life after Mars Investigations cleared his name, though, despite having a wife and child at home.

Dick Casablancas (Ryan Hansen)

The popular kids at Neptune High were called the 09ers, and Dick Casablancas has always been the ultimate 09er: A rich, bullying, obnoxious surfer dude, redeemable only in relation to his criminal father; his gold-digging stepmother; and his troubled brother, Beaver, who committed two of the show’s most terrible atrocities before killing himself. His frat-boy antics followed Veronica to college and beyond, but he has lately become more of an affable doofus in the vein of Hansen’s “Party Down” character.

Richard Casablancas (David Starzyk)

Dick and Beaver’s unctuous father, known as Big Dick, who made his millions in the real estate business, appeared only a few times on the show’s second and third seasons, just long enough to flee SEC agents on fraud charges. He eventually turned himself in and returns in Season 4 with suspicious plans for Neptune’s revitalization.

The Fitzpatricks (Various)

Not even a SoCal beach town is immune from the Irish mob, apparently. The Mars family has foiled these hapless gangsters more than once — Keith put five of them behind bars — but they’re back for more.

Police Department Idiots (Various)

Since Neptune ran Keith out of office over the Lilly Kane investigation, the position of sheriff has generally fallen to contemptible dummies, most notably the now deceased Don Lamb (Michael Muhney), who scoffed at Veronica’s morning-after attempt to report her rape, and his brother, Dan Lamb (Jerry O’Connell), who replaced him in the movie. There’s a new sheriff on the Neptune bomber case, and the bar is low.

Leo D’Amato (Max Greenfield)

The one police department non-idiot is Leo D’Amato. His flirtatious relationship with Veronica led to heartbreak and betrayal in the first season when she got him suspended from his job and broke off their brief romance in order to be with Logan. He remained good-humored and forgiving about it, periodically helping her in later seasons and popping up as a San Diego police detective in the movie.

Vinnie Van Lowe (Ken Marino)

Another Neptune private eye, the morally elastic Vinnie constantly homes in on Mars Investigations business: When Keith and Veronica drop a case, he’s there to pick it up. When Keith runs for sheriff, he finds his way onto the ballot. He has redeemed his sleazy behavior in key moments, however, teaming up with the Marses to catch Steve Guttenberg’s second season villain and saving Veronica from a Fitzpatrick trap.

— Cliff McCormack (Daran Norris): Neptune’s affable public defender is one of Veronica and Keith’s rare allies in town, and he has sent a lot of business their way.

— Jake Kane (Kyle Secor): He was exonerated from killing his own daughter, as Keith originally suspected, but this tech mogul has not been exonerated from being a narcissistic creep.

— Tim Foyle (James Jordan) and Mercer Hayes (Ryan Devlin): These Hearst College villains are responsible for heinous crimes — Foyle for murder, Hayes for serial rape — and Veronica’s sleuthing has drawn their ire.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/television/veronica-mars-is-back-yes-early-heres-what-to-remember.html" id="c5e0e1ab-7ddc-3ed5-a924-50052c2f556c">The New York Times</a>.

Hulu surprised “Veronica Mars” fans at ComicCon on Friday by releasing the show’s eight-episode fourth season a week early. Such instant gratification hasn’t been the norm for “Marshmallows,” the nickname given to longtime devotees of that Southern California noir. Through three ratings-challenged seasons on UPN and CW beginning in 2004, and one Kickstarter-funded movie in 2014, its creator, Rob Thomas, and his cast have maintained its continuity remarkably well. But the time between installm...

'Veronica Mars' Is Back (Yes, Early). Here's What to Remember.

There may come a time when the Netflix algorithm grows sophisticated enough to cut out the middle man and write its own scripts, but until that day arrives, niche-targeted dreck like “The Silence” will have to suffice. If the streaming service’s recent hit “Bird Box” seemed like an ocular companion to the aural deprivation of “A Quiet Place,” this new film feels like a de facto prequel, catching the apocalyptic moment when hordes of sound-sensitive creatures wipe out the bulk of humanity.

For Shane Van Dyke, who wrote the script with his brother Carey, such “mockbuster” enterprises are his business: His credits include off-brand entertainments like “Transmorphers 2” and “Paranormal Entity,” and he even wrote and directed “Titanic II,” a disaster film set on a replica ship 100 years after the original voyage. Here, only a quality cast and more generous production values can cover up the shoddy stitching.

Though adapted from a 2015 novel by Tim Lebbon — himself a movie novelization specialist — “The Silence” echoes “A Quiet Place” in most of its particulars, including a deaf child fleeing with her family to a country refuge. Kiernan Shipka, of “Mad Men” fame, acquits herself well as Ally, a teenager whose heightened perception helps her parents (Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto), grandmother (Kate Trotter) and little brother (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf) escape pterosaurlike carrion called “Vesps.” The family dog has more trouble keeping mum.

“The Silence” posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression.

Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/movies/the-silence-review.html" id="2a0a236e-1a50-308b-aef9-132ef9551b1a">The New York Times</a>.

(Streaming Movie Review)

'The Silence' Review: Fleeing Winged Peril for a Quieter Place

He also showed a willingness to expand the form, whether venturing off the studio backlot to shoot in real locations or experimenting in new techniques.

More than anything, though, Donen can lay claim to a wealth of joyous and innovative dance sequences, from the title number to “Singin’ in the Rain” to Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in “Royal Wedding” to the raucous, CinemaScope barn-raising showdown in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Here are nine films that follow the trajectory of his colorful, cosmopolitan career.

‘On the Town’

Donen’s first feature, co-directed by Gene Kelly, extended their collaboration as choreographers on 1944’s “Anchors Aweigh,” which was also about sailors on leave and also starred Kelly and Frank Sinatra.

While a top-of-the-line studio production — adapted from Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s Broadway musical, with a Leonard Bernstein score — Donen and Kelly nonetheless made baby steps away from the lot, staging its most famous number (“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town/ The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down”) on location and making the camera itself a fluid partner in the choreography.

As sailors who spend 24 sleepless hours touring New York City, each with a dame on his arm, Kelly, Sinatra and Jules Munshin sing and dance with an unfettered enthusiasm that the city, in its mercy, never punctures.

How to watch: Rent or purchase on iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

‘Royal Wedding’

As a pretense to romance and song-and-dance numbers, Donen’s first solo feature is awfully thin, following a brother-sister dance act on a ship from New York to London, where their theatrical bow will coincide with the Royal Wedding.

But the frivolity yields two signature Fred Astaire solo numbers: “Sunday Jumps,” in which he rehearses in the gym, with a coat rack as his partner, and “You’re All the World to Me,” which finds his character so lovestruck that he dances on the walls and ceilings. In both cases, Donen keeps the camera at enough of a distance to appreciate and complement the fullness of Astaire’s performance.

How to watch: Rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

‘Singin’ in the Rain’

Donen and Kelly reunited for what has grown into the consensus favorite for the greatest musical ever made, and for good reason. At least three of the numbers in “Singin’ in the Rain” are all-time greats, divvied up evenly among its stars: Kelly splashing around, with and without an umbrella, in the title number; Donald O’Connor clowning through the vaudeville silliness of “Make ‘Em Laugh;” and Debbie Reynolds cheerfully greeting a new day with “Good Morning.”

Yet there’s unusual richness in the plotting, too, which ingeniously and often hilariously parodies Hollywood’s awkward transition from silents to sound. Kelly, O’Connor and Reynolds are a joyous team, and Jean Hagen, as a silent star with an unfortunate voice, plays their glamorous foil to perfection.

How to watch:Rent or purchase on iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’

Look past the absurdly sexist premise of swarthy backwoodsmen abducting women for marriage — the source material can be traced back to Ancient Roman legend “The Rape of the Sabine Women” — and there’s plenty of admire about Donen’s robust CinemaScope musical.

Working with choreographer Michael Kidd, Donen scales up “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” by accommodating its large, color-coded ensemble with ambitious, screen-filling dance sequences, set against a handsome backlot frontier. A barn-raising contest between the backwoodsmen and their gentlemen rivals, for example, turns into half-balletic, half-acrobatic display of one-upmanship.

‘It’s Always Fair Weather’

Three years after “Singin’ in the Rain” set the standard for Technicolor buoyancy, Kelly and Donen shifted gears with this surprisingly sober treatment of World War II veterans which subverts the three-buddies-in-the-city dynamic of “On the Town” by having Kelly and his two friends experience a more fraught reunion 10 years after the war. Bonds made in wartime have frayed in peacetime, and the men have each had their troubles adapting to civilian life.

Nonetheless, the film packs in some wonderful musical sequences, including Cyd Charisse setting tongues wagging in a boxing hall with “Baby You Knock Me Out” and Kelly performing “I Like Myself” on roller-skates.

‘Funny Face’

Audrey Hepburn. Fred Astaire. George and Ira Gershwin. Sometimes filmmaking needn’t be so difficult. Reprising his role from the Broadway musical 30 years earlier, Astaire stars as a Richard Avedon-like fashion photographer who sees potential in Hepburn’s modest bookstore clerk from the Village.

Astaire and Hepburn are an odd romantic pair to say the least — they were decades apart in age — but Donen underplays that aspect of their relationship to focus on their musical partnership, which is exuberant at times and gently swooning whenever Gershwin pops up on the soundtrack. The location shooting that brought “New York, New York” to life in Donen’s “On the Town” is doubly effective in “Bonjour, Paris,” a number that hits every tourist spot in the city.

‘Indiscreet’

In retrospect, “Indiscreet” feels like a warm-up for the later film “Charade,” with Cary Grant cast in both as a diabolically charming cad who wins over a skeptical heart.

Working as usual in beautiful Technicolor, Donen adapts Norman Krasna’s play “Kind Sir” into a handsome chamber piece about a popular actress (Ingrid Bergman) who takes a chance on a married man (Grant), only to discover that he’s not telling her the full truth, either. While Donen luxuriates in the glamour of two Hollywood stars in evening wear, Grant and especially Bergman trade on more than their charm, digging into characters whose romantic chemistry hinges precariously on trust.

How to watch: Rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play and YouTube.

‘Charade’

Poised somewhere between a Hitchcockian thriller like “North by Northwest” and a classic screwball comedy, Donen’s wildly entertaining play on the spy movie is a Technicolor bauble that feels aligned with the emerging spirit of the French New Wave.

The deliriously clever story whisks Audrey Hepburn’s heroine into danger and adventure when her husband dies under dubious circumstances and three of his former OSS associates come looking for a missing $250,000. Cary Grant plays a mystery man who comes to her aid and may or may not be in cahoots with the men on her trail.

How to watch:Rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

‘Two for the Road’

With international cinema undergoing radical changes in the mid-to-late ‘60s, Donen opened up to a more experimental form with “Two for the Road,” a British road drama that dissects a relationship across multiple timelines.

When the film begins, Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn are a feuding couple driving their Mercedes roadster on a scenic route to Saint-Tropez, which naturally recalls other road trips from the past, when they were more optimistic about their future together. Working from a script by Frederic Raphael (“Darling,” “Eyes Wide Shut”), Donen cuts freely and intuitively across various points in their romantic history, collapsing time into a complex jumble of happy memories and sour portents of things to come.

How to Watch: Rent or purchase on Amazon Prime.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/movies/stanley-donen-best-movies.html" id="a9ea969c-7223-3520-acdf-a253857a08e3">The New York Times</a>.

Movie director Stanley Donen died Thursday at 94. From the moment he and Gene Kelly rose up together from dance choreography to film direction with “On the Town,” Donen specialized in constructing bright, Technicolor productions around top Hollywood talent, including Kelly, Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, and Cary Grant.

Where to Watch 'Singin' in the Rain' and Eight Other Great Stanley Donen Films

Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, director, adapted screenplay, editing, original score.

How to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

In telling the fact-based story of a black Colorado Springs cop named Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) who infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the early 1970s, director Spike Lee takes a tonally audacious approach — part stranger-than-fiction irreverence, part political statement about the legacy of white supremacy. The balance pays off in surprisingly accessible entertainment that bridges the horrors of past and present.

Nominated for: Best picture, costume design, original score, original song, production design, sound editing, sound mixing.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix; rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

The first superhero movie to be nominated for best picture — for all its acclaim, even “The Dark Knight” missed the list — “Black Panther” goes further than any previous Marvel production in bringing thematic weight to escapist spectacle. Michael B. Jordan makes a particularly vivid contribution as Killmonger, a villain whose threat to T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned king of the techno-utopian nation of Wakanda, is rooted in competing notions of black identity.

Nominated for: Best picture, actor, editing, sound editing, sound mixing.

How to watch: Buy it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play.

As music history, “Bohemian Rhapsody” takes a “print the legend” approach to Queen and its electrifying frontman, Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek). The film plays fast-and-loose with the facts, adhering to the formula of traditional biopics like “Walk the Line” and “Ray,” but it was a box-office sensation for a reason, tapping into the creative breakthroughs that led to hits like the title track and into the passion that infused the band’s career-capping Live Aid performance.

Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actress, original screenplay, foreign language film, cinematography, production design, sound editing, sound mixing.

How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

Returning to the Mexico City of his youth, director Alfonso Cuarón vividly imagines his upper-middle-class upbringing through the experiences of a live-in housekeeper (Yalitza Aparicio) whose hardships may not have been clear to him at the time. In the neighborhood of Colonia Roma in 1970, the maid tends to the needs of a bustling family during a turbulent period — for them, for her and for a country roiled by political unrest.

Nominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, supporting actor, adapted screenplay, cinematography, original song, sound mixing.

How to watch: Buy it on iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

For this fourth iteration of “A Star Is Born,” actor-director Bradley Cooper, making his debut behind the camera, works to deconstruct the glam-pop image of his lead actress, Lady Gaga, and discover the more unvarnished and accessible version underneath. Resembling a countrified Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain type, Cooper stars as a stadium rock star who gives Gaga’s drag-bar singer a career boost before drowning himself in the bottle.

Nominated for: Best actress.

How to watch: Buy it on iTunes.

‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’

Nominated for: Best adapted screenplay, original song, costume design.

Nominated for: Best original screenplay.

How to watch: Stream it on Kanopy; rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

Nominated for: Best animated film.

Nominated for: Best animated film, original score.

How to watch: Buy it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

Nominated for: Best documentary.

How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.

Nominated for: Best documentary, original song.

How to watch: Stream it on Hulu; rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and YouTube.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/movies/stream-oscar-nominated-movies.html" id="4e8a5114-6fd3-3c71-a71d-9d37d59fed7b">The New York Times</a>.

Tuesday morning, Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross announced the nominees for the 91st Academy Awards, many of which are already streaming online. Need to get caught up? Some of the biggest contenders are still in theaters, but many are already streaming. Here’s a rundown of where to find those nominees that are streaming in the biggest categories.

Where to Stream the 2019 Oscar Nominated Movies

Eventually, it just gifts the lead character, a scam artist turned educator, with a literal book of quotations. This sweet-and-salty redemption tale from France, written and directed by its mononymous star, Kheiron, wants to deliver a message about the outcasts and ne’er-do-wells of Paris banlieues. And it arrives one corny aphorism at a time.

As Wael, a former street child who steals wallets and hearts, Kheiron prowls through “Bad Seeds” with a sprightly restlessness that seems rooted in his stand-up comedy. Catherine Deneuve graciously cedes the floor as Monique, Wael’s adoptive mother and partner-in-crime, who has mastered her part in a nifty fake purse-snatching scheme. When Victor (André Dussollier), an old acquaintance of hers, catches them in the act, he threatens to press charges unless they agree to take part in his organization, which seeks to rehabilitate teenage delinquents.

There’s some fun in watching Wael con his students into learning — while also teaching them the art of the con — but the film, which debuted last week on Netflix, can’t keep the sentiment at bay for long. Between flashbacks to Wael’s hardscrabble past in an unnamed, bombed-out Middle Eastern city and its insistence on solving the problems of each and every one of his six students, “Bad Seeds” mostly sticks to an earnest syllabus.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/movies/bad-seeds-review.html" id="2ae96715-4252-30d1-a800-2c239ada29bc">The New York Times</a>.

“Bad Seeds” opens with a quote from Victor Hugo. (“There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.”) Then it pivots on another quote about troubled teens. (“Remember, a problem child is a child with problems.”)

'Bad Seeds' Review: A Scam Artist Teaches From the School of Life

The holidays have given us an occasion to dig through the archives to see if New York Times critics were on the right side of history when they first reviewed these films, or if they missed an annual tradition in the making. Here’s a sample of 10 that are available to stream — some established favorites, others quirky upstarts — along with excerpts from what our critics first thought of them.

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946)

Stream it on Amazon.

Frank Capra’s classic tear-jerker about Christmas Eve as a dark night of the soul has been a Yuletide standard-bearer for so long that it’s easy to forget what a ho-hum reception it got at the time. A best-picture nomination was the sole consolation prize for a film about a small-town family man (James Stewart) that neither critics nor audiences fully embraced until the mid-1970s, when its revival as an annual television staple commenced. Sentiments like these, from Bosley Crowther’s review, were common:

“Indeed, the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it — its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities. And Mr. Capra’s ‘turkey dinners’ philosophy, while emotionally gratifying, doesn’t fill the hungry paunch.”

‘White Christmas’ (1954)

Stream it on Netflix; rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

Irving Berlin won an Oscar for the song “White Christmas,” but not for the movie “White Christmas,” which wasn’t produced until a decade after “Holiday Inn,” the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire musical in which the song first appeared. Christmas was but one of the occasions for mirth in “Holiday Inn,” but here it is the VistaVision payoff to the team-up of two different song-and-dance acts. Crowther was unimpressed:

“The colors on the big screen are rich and luminous, the images are clear and sharp, and rapid movements are got without blurring — or very little — such as sometimes is seen on other large screens. Director Michael Curtiz has made his picture look good. It is too bad that it doesn’t hit the eardrums and the funny bone with equal force.”

‘Black Christmas’ (1974)

Stream it on Shudder; rent it on Google Play, iTunes and YouTube.

Before taking a decidedly warmer view of the holiday season with “A Christmas Story,” director Bob Clark offered this nasty piece of counterprogramming, a proto-"Halloween” slasher film with big scares and boozy wit, much of it coming from Margot Kidder. “Black Christmas” proved to be vastly influential, particularly in its use of first-person camera, but contemporaneous reviews, like A.H. Weiler’s, were dismissive:

“This moody depiction of the Christmas slayings of university sorority sisters and their housemother, among others, is as murky as the script, which dotes largely on obscenities that are no more pointed than the violence, dull direction and pedestrian performances.”

‘A Christmas Story’ (1983)

Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

Clark’s nostalgia-soaked comedy about a put-upon 9-year-old (Peter Billingsley) in the 1940s and his disaster-prone Midwestern family owes its popularity to Turner broadcasting, which turned a modest hit into a phenomenon by airing it relentlessly on TBS and TNT. Cherished details like the “Little Orphan Annie” decoder ring, a triple-dog dare on the schoolyard and the Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle were lost on Vincent Canby at the time:

“There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in ‘A Christmas Story,’ but you have to possess the stamina of a pearl diver to find them.”

‘Gremlins’ (1984)

Rent it on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

Chaos and malevolence come to a Capra-esque small town in Joe Dante’s anarchic comedy about an exotic pet from Chinatown that turns out to be a troublemaking Christmas present. Dante’s Looney Tunes-style upending of its wholesome holiday setting pushed its PG rating far enough to help trigger the development of PG-13, and the kiddie-movie violence left Canby shaken:

“(Dante and the screenwriter Chris Columbus) attack their young audience as mercilessly as the creatures attack the characters. One minute they’re fondly recalling Frank Capra’s sentimental classic, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and the next minute they’re subjecting this Capraesque Smalltown, U.S.A., to a devastation that makes the original ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ look benign.”

‘Scrooged’ (1988)

Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” had been adapted so many times to heartwarming effect — as drama, in the Reginald Owen and Alastair Sim standards from 1938 and 1951; as a musical, with Albert Finney in 1970; and with Muppets in 1992 — that it needed Bill Murray to drop a few coals in the stocking. The film’s spiked nog of cynicism and sentimentality wasn’t easy for some to swallow, including Canby:

“As Frank Cross, the ratings-mad program chief of the IBC television network, Mr. Murray’s contemporary Scrooge is a joy as long as he’s making life miserable for everyone around him. When, finally, Frank sees the error of his ways, the movie succumbs to its heart of jelly.”

‘Die Hard’ (1988)

The question of whether “Die Hard” is a true Christmas movie, rather than merely the template for the last 30 years of action cinema, has been a perennial debate for a long time now. But in 1988, critics like Caryn James were mostly coming to terms with its blockbuster excess:

“Partly an interracial buddy movie, partly the sentimental tale of a ruptured marriage, the film is largely a special-effects carnival full of machine-gun fire, roaring helicopters and an exploding tank. It also has a villain fresh from the Royal Shakespeare Company, a thug from the Bolshoi Ballet and a hero who carries with him the smirks and wisecracks that helped make ‘Moonlighting’ a television hit. The strange thing is, it works: ‘Die Hard’ is exceedingly stupid, but escapist fun.”

‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ (1989)

The idea of Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) — that hapless, foolhardy model of Midwestern fatherdom — was always more potent than the “Vacation” comedies themselves, which had already worn out their welcome when this second sequel came along. Yet the various slapstick catastrophes in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” were a hit with audiences, who laughed over the loud sighs of critics like Janet Maslin:

“Fatigue is in the air. This third look at the quintessentially middle-American Griswold family, led by Clark (Mr. Chase) and the very patient Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) is only a weary shadow of the original ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation,’ which found a lot to laugh at as it followed the dopey paterfamilias Clark and his quarrelsome brood on a hellish cross-country journey in their station wagon.”

‘Love Actually’ (2003)

Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube.

Christmas seems like the only occasion big enough to accommodate this oversized mistletoe from Richard Curtis, the screenwriter of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill,” who combines about half a dozen rom-coms into one mega-rom-com. The film’s too-muchness is an annual indulgence for fans, but A.O. Scott, in one of his most blistering reviews, is not one of them:

“A romantic comedy swollen to the length of an Oscar-trawling epic — nearly two and a quarter hours of cheekiness, diffidence and high-tone smirking — it is more like a record label’s greatest-hits compilation or a ‘very special’ sitcom clip-reel show than an actual movie.”

‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (2005)

Starting with his breakthrough script for “Lethal Weapon,” Shane Black has set six of his films over Christmas in Los Angeles, but “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” his directorial debut, is especially keen about finding evidence of the holiday in a city where it isn’t so obvious. This neo-noir buddy picture about a thief posing as an actor (Robert Downey Jr.) who joins forces with a private eye (Val Kilmer) on a murder case is Yuletide fun for smart-alecks, but not for A.O. Scott:

“I don’t think ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’ is an altogether bad movie. It’s just a movie with no particular reason for existing, a flashy, trifling throwaway whose surface cleverness masks a self-infatuated credulity.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/movies/christmas-movies.html" id="a1659248-4bbd-3259-a578-ca001a7acbfb">The New York Times</a>.

From as far back as Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which struggled to find its footing in the end-of-the-year glut of late December 1946, predicting the canon of Christmas movie future has never been easy. Some of today’s favorites had to survive a critical drubbing, or a ho-hum box office. Others needed a push from cable TV. And still others just didn’t seem like holiday movies, becoming classics almost accidentally thanks to reclassification or cult followings.

10 Classic Christmas Movies That New York Times Critics Didn't See Coming

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

White Christmas (1954)

Black Christmas (1974)

Rent it on Google Play, iTunes and YouTube.

A Christmas Story (1983)

Gremlins (1984)

Scrooged (1988)

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” had been adapted so many times to heartwarming effect — as drama, in the Reginald Owen and Alastair Sims standards from 1938 and 1951; as a musical, with Albert Finney in 1970; and with Muppets in 1992 — that it needed Bill Murray to drop a few coals in the stocking. The film’s spiked nog of cynicism and sentimentality wasn’t easy for some to swallow, including Canby:

Die Hard (1988)

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Love Actually (2003)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

The creature in the third season of “Stranger Things” is a grisly, fearsome, overpowering amalgam of borrowed parts, created from the melted-down essence of other beings. Which is to say, the creature is “Stranger Things.”

Every season, this sci-fi pastiche assembles itself into a different patchwork of pop-culture influences, rooted in a Spielbergian vision of suburbia but otherwise a K-Tel greatest hits compilation. Even the way this season’s creature gets its shape, gathering mass from the splattered remains of its victims, is an homage to the liquefied metal of the T-1000 in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” (Though this season takes place in the summer of 1985, the references are inching past the ’80s.)

The show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, have said they will end the show after four or five seasons, but the first three are like a recycling plant, harvesting old movies and tried-and-true formulas like endlessly renewable resources. A creature emerges from under Hawkins, Indiana, the gang bands together to put down the threat, and the pattern repeats itself the next season, with only one or two narrative threads left dangling.

The Duffers understand nostalgia as the comforts of the familiar, and they seem content to write the same piece of fan fiction and expect the same result. It’s not the worst strategy.

The third season ran it back effectively, helped along by a breathless pace and an emotional investment in its characters that keeps paying off. The same people have been beating back a supernatural apocalypse for years, and the experience is like trench warfare, suffused with unending trauma and loss but also the camaraderie of working together for a common cause. When the onset of puberty is added to the mix, as it is in the third season, the intensity of those feelings is heightened all the more. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) winds up losing her powers, but hey, at least she gets a reprieve from thinking about a boy. Sometimes.

The big new addition to Season 3 was the Starcourt Mall, whose secret network of tunnels below were like a high-tech mirror of the more organic dig-dug below the Hawkins Lab in previous seasons. “Stranger Things” has always had a casual engagement with the real cultural changes in the ’80s — last season threw in a couple of Reagan-Bush and Mondale-Ferraro signs on the lawns — but the mall’s effect on ma-and-pa operations downtown was smartly noted.

For one, it pushed the Byers family that much further out the door: Joyce (Winona Ryder) had already seen the Mind Flayer torture her son Will (Noah Schnapp) below and above the surface, and now she is clerking at a general store with no customers. It’s more than the creature that’s sucking the life out of Hawkins, which isn’t the only town in America surrendering to the big chains.

In 1985, the summer of “Back to the Future” and “The Goonies,” it’s telling that the first movie to get screen time this season was George Romero’s “Day of the Dead,” which is about scientists and military types occupying underground bunkers while zombies terrorize the planet. “Stranger Things” gave it a “Red Dawn” twist by having the eggheads and soldiers carry out a Russian plot, and an “Aliens” twist by having them harness supernatural power for military application. Through the bribery and coercion of a weak, narcissistic mayor (Cary Elwes), the Russians were able to turn the Starcourt Mall into a front for late Cold War subversion.

As the Russians used their power-draining, real estate-gobbling electromagnetic drill to blast open the gate that Eleven expended so much energy to seal at the end of Season 2, it cracked open enough space for the Upside Down to wreak havoc once again. Last season, the volatile newcomer Billy (Dacre Montgomery) seized the bad-boy crown from Steve “the Hair” Harrington (Joe Keery), who was relegated to scooping ice cream in a sailor suit at the mall. But this season, Hawkins’ resident mom magnet paid the price. He was the first of many citizens to get sucked into a new supernatural threat, which had the power to possess people (and rats), like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” or simply mash them into a slithering pulp that added to its size and strength.

The fight against the creature divided into three camps, which were helpfully given code names in the finale. The Griswold Family, so named for its deluxe “Vacation”-style station wagon, included most of the younger generation: Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will, Eleven, Max (Sadie Sink), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer).

The Scoops Troop was a gang of code-breaking, lab-infiltrating mall rats, composed of the Scoops Ahoy employees Steve and Robin (Maya Hawke, the season’s best new addition), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Erica (Priah Ferguson), Lucas’ sample-abusing little sister.

That left the grown-ups, Joyce and Hopper (David Harbour), along with the paranoiac private eye Murray (Brett Gelman). To Murray’s chagrin, Dustin named their group Bald Eagle.

Before the Griswold Family, the Scoops Troop and Bald Eagle picked up their walkie-talkies for the climactic battle, however, “Stranger Things” took a little time to gather its forces. Dustin’s removal from his buddies for much of the season was one of several fractures within the group, having little to do with any outside threats bearing down on them. Although Will was spared the direct attention of the Mind Flayer this season, his eagerness to return to epic Dungeons &amp; Dragons sessions with his friends was squashed by their preoccupation with girls.

Lucas and Max were locked into the type of on-again-off-again romance that happens between unseasoned teenagers, and their misery rubbed off on Mike and Eleven, who made the mistake of taking their advice.

Over at the town newspaper — a heartbreakingly well-staffed operation, as today’s journalist will surely note — Nancy and Jonathan secured internships, but Nancy couldn’t get the respect of its all-male editorial unit, even after landing the story of the season. While their editors laughed off their investigation, the two followed up on strange phenomena around town, including an older woman (Peggy Miley) who had trapped a possessed rat and eventually started eating her weight in fertilizer. Something was up. They’d seen this movie before.

Most of the fun in the third season, however, came from outside the core group of stars. Gelman’s investigator-conspiracist was a great addition to the previous season, but once he got paired up with a Russian scientist (Alec Utgoff), who spills the beans to Joyce and Hopper, a sweet buddy comedy broke out in the middle of the chaos.

So, too, the delightful relationship between Steve and Robin, whose adventures in code-breaking and espionage broke the monotony of scooping ice cream in humiliating uniforms. (Shades of Captain Hook Fish &amp; Chips in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” — one of many “Fast Times” references in the series, including the entire Starcourt setting.) Their chemistry was so vibrant, in fact, that the revelation that Robin was into girls seemed tacked-on, like a hasty appeal to LGBTQ viewers.

Given how essential Eleven’s powers were in beating back the Mind Flayer in the previous two seasons, the choice to have them betray her in the finale made the inevitable triumph more of a group effort. The Griswold Family tossed Fourth of July fireworks at the creature, the Scoops Troop controlled communications with Dustin’s homemade satellite system and stopped Billy from running over Nancy, and Bald Eagle disrupted the Russian lab, which included a big showdown between Hopper and an enforcer who was one part Dolph Lundgren in “Rocky IV” to three parts Robert Patrick in “Terminator 2.” Hopper gets killed in the process — or does he? — but this was the clearest victory for mere mortals that “Stranger Things” has allowed.

In the aftermath, the show delivered the heartbreak, if a bit too shamelessly. The Byers family finally packed up a U-Haul, taking the now-fatherless Eleven with them. That meant splitting up Eleven and Mike, Jonathan and Nancy, and Will and his friends, and unleashing a torrent of emotion — and that’s not counting the heartfelt words left behind by Hopper, written when he was trying a sane way of keeping Eleven and Mike from smooching all day. (Absolutely no chance Hopper would write anything that sentimental, but that character has been hard to track the last two seasons.)

The Mind Flayer may be gone for good, but Hawkins is in the rearview mirror, too. “Stranger Things” wrung all the tears it could get out of that bittersweet moment, and yet for the first time, the show didn’t basically reset itself heading into the next season. It will take some creative wrangling to reunite the Byers family with all the friends and Demogorgons they left behind. (Nothing on any season would feel as uncanny as if the boys gathered next season to watch “Stand by Me,” which opened in 1986.)

One thing is certain: They’re going to have to get their Orange Juliuses somewhere new.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/arts/television/stranger-things-season-3-recap.html" id="01344621-924b-3ff9-a1a3-f6b41ec88a07">The New York Times</a>.

'Stranger Things' season 3 recap: All's well that ends weird

This recap includes spoilers for Season 3 of “Stranger Things,” including the finale.

She also likes sticking Bugles on her fingertips, consulting with a shelf of Care Bears and a color palette that suggests an explosion at the Skittles factory.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that — at least not according to Samantha McIntyre, who wrote the script, and Brie Larson, who directs and stars, earnestly championing a dreamer that others might dismiss as childish or ridiculous. In fact, “Unicorn Store” becomes an argument for itself: If such a tacky fantasy can get produced, then clearly it’s a viable enterprise for grown-ups.

Although the film predates “Captain Marvel” — it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, and it is only now on Netflix — the chemistry between its two stars, Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, shrewdly connects the two projects.

Resigned to the cubicle drudgery of a public relations agency, where she serves as a temp, Kit (Larson) responds to an invitation to “The Store,” a mysterious operation run by a Willy Wonka type (Jackson) who offers to sell her “what she needs.” Kit asks for a unicorn.

As Kit designs a homemade stable for the animal, “Unicorn Store” establishes a crude binary between her rainbow iconoclasm and the assortment of middle-aged stiffs who nudge her toward a life of coffee-swilling and temp work. The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.

“Unicorn Store” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

'Unicorn store' review When it's never time to put away childish things

All that glitters is not gold in the Netflix original film “Unicorn Store,” a sickly-sweet monument to arrested development, built around a failed artist who never grew past the mythical, magical, one-horned creature that enchanted her as a child.

Scott Tobias

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